Question
What is the significance of all the users and groups?
- Posted on March 4, 2015
- LEMPGetting StartedLinux BasicsUbuntu
Asked by Jason Johnson
I’m a newbie just kind of toying with setting up a web server. I found a tutorial that said to change ownership of a new domain’s directory to www-data:www-data but then I noticed the default directory was root:root.
So I now have these questions:
- I found that there is already a user and group called www-data but what does that mean?
- When someone visits the website they’re viewing it as the www-data user?
- Is that a default user or is it something nginx created?
- Does the www-data group have limited permissions or something?
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When a folder is “user:group” you are referring to the fact that the folder is owned by user “user” who belongs to group “group”. When a folder is created (in this case, /var/www), the ownership goes to the user who created it. When the VPS was created, it was created by the root user so the folders . You can change the ownership to www-data:www-data or you can change permissions to allow NGINX (or any program operating at www-data:www-data) certain permissions (which is a whole other topic in itself).
If you wanted to change ownership of the folder to www-data and pretty much give NGINX full access, open up the console and issue the command “chown www-data:www-data /var/www” (if you are the root user). If you aren’t the root user, you’ll need to prefix the above command with “sudo”.
If you wanted to change the permissions, that’s a much more in depth command but generally speaking, you use the command “chmod”. Google it and there are plenty of articles that will go into the permissions more in depth.